Current President of MENSA/musical artist Ray J recently released what has been described by every human with ears as a Kanye West diss track about Kim Kardashian, called I Hit It First. But former Rhodes Scholar Ray J insists that we are wrong and that I Hit It First is not about his sexual escapades with a pre-famous Kim Kardashian at all. If this is the case -- which it most assuredly is given Ray J's record for intellectual and moral decency -- then we must dig deeper and understand what Ray J truly "hit first." A close-reading of the lyrics to I Hit It First yielded a few possibilities.

See also: The Ballad of Kim Kardashian and The-Dream: A Speculative Musical

More »

courtesy Jason Wade, Unitus Arts & Entertainment Festival

Jesse Waters a/k/a "Scarab," photographed here on August 7, 2011, didn't necessarily identify as a Juggalo.

His name was Jesse, but he went by Scarab or Drake. He was 24, stood five-feet, nine-inches tall, and had reddish-brown shoulder-length hair. He'd driven to the 12th annual Gathering of the Juggalos this year with his girlfriend, a young woman named Melody, who'd been handcrafting boxes with Insane Clown Posse's Joker's Card figures to sell at the festival for five bucks a piece. And then on Friday, he vanished.

On Sunday evening, a barricade fence inexplicably went up by the Gathering's Main Stage, in a stage-left area adjacent to the Ohio River. Rumor was that the Coast Guard found a floating person in the water near the Kentucky-Illinois state lines, a fact confirmed Monday by Illinois' Hardin County police. Yesterday, Kentucky's Union County coroner identified the body found on nearby Sturgeon Island as Jesse Waters from Murfreesboro, Tennessee.

More »

A friend of a friend shares with SOTC an interesting story he originally posted on his Facebook page: It's 9:50 a.m., Thursday morning, when his work cell phone -- a number pretty much reserved for co-workers and family -- rings. On the other end? A mysterious yet familiar voice. The question? "Have you heard of Weezy F. Baby?" The rest of the conversation, between our friend of a friend (FOF) and a guy we'll call Lil Wayne, went like this:

More »

Seems we weren't the only ones wondering about the mysterious disappearance of New York Noise--even Ted Leo wants to know. The excellent local-music-video show on the Bloomberg-conceived, city-funded network NYC-TV--ahem, NYC life--that's been around for eight whopping seasons, and predates everything from Pitchfork TV to Black Cab Sessions, suddenly evaporated at the end of last month. Reruns inexplicably moved from Wednesdays at 11pm and midnight on Sundays to the zombie-zone of Tuesday at 5 am, the official online archives vanished, and the station declared the show "on hiatus." Not canceled, thankfully, just not in production. And even though there's been a massive personnel overhaul at the station, in the wake of a NYC-TV scandal last summer, New York Noise creator Shirley Braha is still working at NYC Media. Which brings us back to the original question: what happened to New York Noise?

More »

Discovery #1 versus Discovery #2

Buried in this Wall Street Journal piece about how allegedly "All the Good Band Names Are Taken" is a clarification of something we've been wondering about for a minute: the ongoing confusion of two NY-based musical projects named Discovery. Couple months back, walking by the Knitting Factory space in Williamsburg, yours truly noticed a show flyer for a band called "Discovery" and stopped to look. Huh? Discovery finally playing live? Zach will finally have that plastic-R&B-pop record he likes so much ruined for him? Oh wait, this band photo has a lady in it. Huh? And so it wasn't a live show of the Vampire Weekend/Ra Ra Riot side project, it was a booking for some other "Eastern European nu wave" band also called Discovery. This has happened to Sound of the City more than once, and apparently Time Out made the same mistake last fall and credited the listing to that other XL-signed Discovery, which would've been notable since the laptop-beats duo haven't played a live New York show since the release of LP.

More »

The street sign in Hollis, the Broadway show, and now the death doc. The angle here does appear to be particularly valedictory, pro forma declarations of love and respect by Jeezy, Ja, et al aside. "Legendary hip-hop DJ Jason Mizell, aka Jam Master Jay, is gunned down in his Queens studio. Security tapes of the incident mysteriously disappear, the five witnesses are uncooperative and no one is talking...until now," goes the teaser line. The documentary as attempt to solve an open murder is nothing new, of course--just ask Nick Broomfield. But it remains a jarring way to talk about someone who didn't die all that long ago. We'll see, I guess. [h/t Daily Swarm]